Surviving in Low Light
by sprygirl
Summary: Set after "The Climb." Felicity and the gang try to get through winter. Featuring the fern and Felicity's attempts at botany. First part (seven small parts) are a little sad, and then last part (two longer parts) much happier- Oliver returns of course!


Surviving in Low Light

1.

The first time it was just practical- - Verne had gotten nicked by Mr. Kaboom Boomerang after all, and Roy was just about to tear off the dangling broken frond when Oliver had held up his wait-a-minute finger and, mutely, took a tiny blade from his boot and sliced the frond off, low, walking away with the cutting. Roy paused his broom and raised his eyebrows at Oliver's retreating back, but Felicity shrugged her shoulders and said, pointing at her own brows: "you're gonna hurt someone with those things if you don't learn how to trim'em when you're young."

The next day when she arrived two tiny ferns were sitting, potted neatly in a recycled egg carton, next to the big one. Felicity was delighted. "Did you do this?"

"Uh huh," Oliver said. "Just needs to be pretty wet for the first week."

"This, er, botanical knowledge…from Lian Yu?"

"No. Gardener. Mom used to make me help him summers. As punishment mostly, but I kind of liked it. I just dusted the cutting in rooting hormone – it should take under the lights here."

"Rooting hormone. Who knew?" Felicity said, grinning. Oliver grinned back.

2.

Two weeks later there were only three of them in the lair.

"Woah, Ouch," Roy said, wrinkling his nose when he approached.

"Hey." Digg warned. He looked from where he and Felicity were peering at her bank of screens trying to cross reference assassinations and mountain ranges. "We're all working here." He put his hand on her shoulder and huffed, "It's not _beauty hour,_ Abercrombie."

Felicity pressed her hands over her day-four ponytail. She pulled one of the two pencils she had tucked into her increasingly curly front hair and then, glaring at Roy, crossed out one location on the list in front of her and put the pencil right back in.

"Hey! I wasn't…I wasn't talking about _her," _Roy said. "I was talking about the plant."

They all looked over at the fern and its fernlets, drooping like sad baby Groot in their dry egg-cup beds. Felicity bit her lip and went back to the screens glowing bluely in front of her.

When Roy and Digg left together later, she stood up and stretched. She took a drink and then, pausing, walked over to Verne and dumped the rest of her water bottle into the big fern. She refilled for the little ones, pressing her lips together while she watched the water stain their dry soil dark again.

That night she took the cuttings home with her. She kept them in her bathroom, where they'd be protected from the radiator heat that clanked on every day at exactly 5:20 in the morning. They seemed to double in size in the shower steam, like her hair did. This pleased the remote part of her that was capable of being pleased at this time.

3.

Hanukkah arrived without her notice, outside of a pang when she got a package. It was from her mom, and Felicity unwrapped seven pairs of the tiniest day-of-the-week underpants she'd ever seen, plus one ridiculous blue-trimmed-with-white fluff scrap of something (a _teddy_? She didn't know the name for it - _chemise_? _bralette_? Anyway it was some kind of Hanukkah Barbie lingerie ) –the card was marked, of course, "just in case flannel is not what's required).

She wrapped and sent a package back: an updated Palmer smart watch and seven new cover-and-band sets for it, the glitteriest ones they made. But menorah candles were not happening this year. Much as she liked the underdog fighters of the story, reminders of a protective god doing miracles for the faithful made her grind her teeth right now, and she did not want to be angry at god along with everything else.

Instead, she put two more growing fernlets on the windowsill where her menorah usually went.

4.

On the tenth day of his absence, Felicity brought three more cuttings into her all-windows office, potted in office-appropriate sleek black-marble pots. Jerry bustled in while she was watering them, and cried, "Oh I can do that Ms. Smoak!" He smiled, taking the spout from her. "You've been working too hard, anyway, look at you, it's like you haven't slept in days." Felicity burned red while he watered, hating to be seen through. "I know all about ferns, actually. My boyfriend works at the botanical gardens," he added, shyly. "Did you root these yourself?"

"Uh huh," she said. "Rooting hormone."

"Well they're going to do great here. All this light! Do you mind my asking what you used? Rapid Root? Clonex?"

Felicity widened her eyes, thinking of the moderately humiliating trip to the garden supply the day before – her first trip out of the tight triangle she'd worn between office, house, and lair in the last two weeks. How she'd felt uncomfortably at sea and whispered apologies to all the newbies she might have ever made feel incompetent during her days at Techvillage. She said, as casually and confidently as she could, "Clonex. Yeah, Clonex for sure."

Jerry smiled at her. "You've just helped me win an argument at home." He hummed happily as he positioned them on the sill. "I'm so glad to have some GREEN here! Our whole window in the living room is all plants- you _need_ them, you know?"

Felicity nodded. She hadn't before. Her whole life she'd been about circuits and wiring, not green-and-growing. She didn't even _wear_ leaf or flower prints, not hardly ever.

But she thought of her home, now dotted with ever-increasing green - Verne's cuttings, now over twenty, some in every room. For a brief, wild moment she saw herself as a Crazy Fern Lady, fronds exploding out of coffee cups and billowing from hanging pots, waving greenly over doorways and dangling to obstruct every cabinet and entryway like a troupe of overfond botanical Muppets. She would be one step away from Miss Havisham, keeping a green torch lit for her old _loverrrrr._ Almost lover. Which is what Miss Havisham was, having not got to marry the guy, but loving him long past the time he left her, probably long after he was dead.

She turned to the cabinet behind her to hide her face. She hated feeling like this, but would have hated being asked about it more. Lord knows she knew what it was like to be an EA and it was a job that didn't need unexplainable boss-tears added on.

5.

Never in her life did Felicity ever think she'd be sympathetic to Moira Queen-that lady was batshit crazy. But after four weeks with no word from Oliver she began to think she might know a little more why – because missing, _presumed_ dead must be way different than dead. Dead there were rituals for, traditions that got you through to the other side of mourning. Shivas to sit, goodbyes to say. Missing – that was a purgatory that was full of suck.

She looked at the windowsill in Moira's old office building—thrivingly green, thanks to Jerry's ministrations and very good light indeed. _Wouldn't they shrink or shrivel if he was dead?_ some part of her whispered. _Wouldn't they give her a sign_?

When her brain became unruly like this, Felicity understood how alcoholics got that way. How any distraction seemed better than feeling the feelings that were available to you. How in dark times you just did whatever it took to get through – coded or worked or binged or baked (or planted fern cuttings). That there wasn't much hope of regular living right how, let alone thriving. Now was the time to just concentrate on surviving.

6.

The world was suddenly lousy with superheroes.

There was Ray, stupid Ray with his stupid smile and his stupid suit and logo and his dumb ideas about saving the city, as if that were his idea, as if this was his city. She'd help him of course.

Two others were hers already to help, god love her. Laurel and Roy had developed a pretty good system for the level-one crime they'd agreed to take on. And Digg had come to a stepped up to working some comms in a way she felt just fine with; she was not working, as Oliver would say, with her whole head in the game. John had, in fact, become pretty adept at most of her often-repeated search functions, and she was teaching him systems now, because it was smart to back each other up as much as possible. She liked watching him learn, getting more comfortable with the grey-er areas of computer espionage. The bad guys were still dark as ever, and it made the means by which they got information seem less important.

Report after report of the mysterious "Flash" of Central City ticked across her dashboards. She hadn't heard much from the team there after Cisco's uncharacteristically terse message had come to her: "_We might have found Caitlin's fiancée alive…but kinda changed. More later." _That night, when her radiator clanked her awake at 5:20 am, Felicity sent Caitlin a note: _thinking of you_, because she was and because on a scale of zero to seriously private and too-jealous-to-talk, she was at about at an eight.

One night after hearing Laurel struggle when Roy had been knocked out, Felicity waited for Digg to come back with them, but was surprised by a message from Laurel's phone: _"I need help with her, can you let me in?"_

Heart hammering, she checked the cameras outside and saw that indeed Laurel was being carried by some large person, but not Digg, and so she was nearly wild when she opened the door to find…Laurel's boxing guy, the one they thought was a serial killer, dressed for action except for the hood that hung behind him which appeared to have…cat ears? "I was following her," he mumbled as she bustled him inside, "and she got in a situation so I jumped in."

Felicity counted to ten as she peeled black the platinum wig from Laurel's bloody hairline, and then silently swore at the sugar-crash feeling of the adrenaline going sour in her body. "That bump is gonna ache in the morning. Thank you…uh..."

"Ted. Ted Grant. Wildcat gym."

"Wildcat gym Ted. Thank you."

Felicity dug in the medical supply drawers beneath their crash table. She brought up a tray and took a steadying breath before taking up the lidocaine and syringe. "Pretty sure this needs stitches," she muttered.

"Uh, you want me to handle that?" Ted asked. "I'm experienced…you know, boxing repairs and all that. Like Rocky?" Felicity shook her head at him. "Really, uh, you look like you're gonna hurl."

When Digg walked in a few minutes later and stopped cold at the silhouette of the broad back bent over the table, stitching away, Felicity met his eyes, and then walked with as much dignity as she could muster to the bathroom, where she did indeed hurl.

The fernlet that lived on the back of the lair toilet looked sympathetically at her. "Shut up." she told it.

Despite this, all around her, the team was gaining strength as a unit and Felicity found that busy and being in charge were better than the alternative. She was a good boss, she realized. And being a boss made it so much easier to keep what was private, private.

Which was a molten and super-unstable emotional substance best expressed in the words of Toad from Frog and Toad, shrieking about his missing button: "_The whole world is covered with superheroes, and not one of them is MINE!"_

7.

And then world quietly ended.

Malcolm Merlyn, trapped on his way back into Starling and gnashing like a rat, spat his knowledge from the darker world: Oliver Queen was dead, run through by the Demon Head, Ra's Al Ghul.

"He's lying," Roy said, showing a strength and authority unseen six weeks ago. "Don't listen to this asshole. They call him the Magician but he's just a trickster; he'll say anything to knock us off our game." Laurel, trembling all over but with bowstring admirably steady, said, "I'm going to kill him anyway. He's Sara's murderer, I don't give a shit what words come out of him. Thea, back away!"

Felicity, on the comms, heard all this as though from the bottom of a well. She registered the struggle that ensued, and knew, when it was over, that all of them would come back. Well, not Thea and Merlyn.

And not Oliver, if Merlyn was to be believed.

Diggle stood, still but with a muscle jumping in his jaw, in the same spot for a full minute after the comms went out. And then he walked over his bo staffs, picked one up, and swung it into the nearest glass case, the one that held Oliver's old traditional green-feathered arrows. He smashed the case, and the arrows in their rack, and the glass that had fallen, and then rack itself.

He looked up at Felicity, eyes glimmering and nostrils flared, and held out the staff to her. She took it, surprised at how heavy it was. Shouldered it, looked around, and spied Verne.

The crack of the staff breaking the ceramic pot was satisfying, she would remember later. She smashed the pot, Verne laying like an abandoned wig across the room, and smashed the pieces and even stomped on some of them after.

And then John held her in his enormous arms while she shook her sobs into his chest, and didn't say anything when she gathered up Verne, scooping as much of the root-ball into her arms as she could, and scurried out into the night with the unpotted fern. He held the door open for her.

8.

Muscle memory must have driven Felicity home that night. She vaguely remembered the smell of dirt and greenery and dumping Verne into a mixing bowl in the kitchen, on top of some decorative lemons. She'd stumbled into bed without taking off her clothes and cried until she fell asleep.

When she awoke it was still dark. She felt emptied out. She thought of her mother, who had, despite the porn-star wardrobe, been a very good mother of little children – when she was crying, she'd croon a song from _Free to Be You and Me_ , a remnant of her mother's own childhood in the seventies: "It's alright to cry". They both liked it because it was true – crying _did_ get the sad out.

All the same, she was covered in actual dirt and still wearing a bra. She felt too heavy to move, though. Under all of these thoughts flowed a nauseating current of dread she didn't want to drown in. She stared at the ceiling, feeling the middle-of-the-night alone feeling you get when you are awake in a sleeping world. She felt tears prick her nose again.

When the radiator clanked in the living room she startled, and, clenching her fists, decided to get up and shower. 5:20 was an acceptable time to get up, and lying there was to start to submerge.

She covered her eyes against the light she flicked on in the bathroom, reaching with one hand to start the hot water going. Back in the dimmer hall, she shucked her skirt, and she was headed toward the hamper in her room, grimacing at the dirt-covered buttons of her new blouse, when she heard the radiator thunk again.

Even drowsy, her busy, pattern-making mind registered that the radiator did not thunk twice after its initial wake up. So part of her was reviewing _Solar-plexus-Instep-Groin-Nose_ moves and another part of her was yelling at herself for being in her stupid Thursday underpants when attacked (a third part whining _but she was in her own house_) when she squinted around the doorway from the hall where she'd flattened herself and registered what was stepping, as gracefully as no one else she knew for all his size, through the window onto the floor.

She watched him as he dropped his bag and took a step through the dark towards where she should be, and watched him stop. He didn't seem to know what to do with himself when he saw her bed was empty. He bowed his head and took a long breath, hands limp at his sides.

And while later she thought about what a terrible risk it might have been to her personal safety, because he was a trained fighter and because she was not, in fact, wearing her glasses at the time and could have been mistaken about all of it, she could not bear the site of his empty hands. She dropped her laundry, choked out, "Oliver!" and ran at him, jumping up for good measure and wrapping arms and legs around him where he stood.

He staggered back just once and then he was kissing her back, hands full of Thursday underpants and wild curls, matching her enthusiasm with not much more accuracy. "You're alive," she murmured around a kiss, and then, "Merlyn told us you died," she held his face in her hands and kissed him, hard. "You're here," and she pressed kiss after kiss into to his dimple, his other cheekbone, the corner of his mouth. They were both shaking. "Oliver," she whispered, and kissed him again. "You scared me."

"I didn't want to wake you."

She kissed him again such that she didn't really register what he said until she did and then she said, "huh?"

Another shaky breath, and then he whispered, "I just couldn't wait, but I didn't want to wake you, but I had to see you, so I…" he rested his forehead on hers.

"Oliver."

He opened his eyes.

"I wasn't talking about climbing in my window. I was talking about you being dead. Or mostly dead or presumed dead or dead _again_ but…dead. Which I have kind of learned to not trust but still."

"Ah." He furrowed his brow and shifted her weight in his arms, seemingly content to breathe there. She was suddenly self-conscious. She was kissing Oliver, in her house, in her underwear, which was something she'd thought of but had not yet actually done, and she vaguely registered that there was some step-skipping here, weeks of missed conversations, her part of which she'd been rehearsing for weeks now but had never gotten to speak aloud. She unwound her legs and stretched to touch her feet to the floor. She took half a step back when she was tugged and plastered again tight to his chest. "No, come back." She heard what might have been lightness in his voice, almost a laugh.

This time she did pull away a little so she could see more than his sweater. "So, you're going with _Ah_? as your answer? To the question of whether or how you died and where you've been and how you got back and why Merlyn would call you dead? Oliver!"

"Felicity..."

"This is not a good time for mystery!" She clutched his sweater and said, "_Answers girl_. As much as I'm…I don't even know how to say how _good_ I am right now, as opposed to ten minutes ago…tell me something so I can make sense of these last months of suck!"

He sighed. "We can't go back to the you-kissing-me-all-part?" he deadpanned, then grinned. "I liked that part."

She smiled an icy smile and shook her head.

"Ok." He blew out a breath, and took one in. "Didn't die, almost did, old friend from Hong Kong now in League changed heart, snow cave, water from possibly-magical pit, killing Ra's, escaping us from Nepal, long journey home, thought of nothing else but you for 9,000 miles, don't want to be any further than here for a long time."

Felicity swallowed, and sat down on her bed. "Ok. That's…that's, um, good." She wasn't sure why she was crying now, just leaky tears running down her face, and she pressed the cool backs of her hands against her hot cheeks.

"Don't cry." Oliver said, sinking to his knees in front of her. He put his hands on her face and put a thumb on her trembling bottom lip. "Please don't cry. I love you."

She stared at him, still producing tears, and nodded. "I know," she gurgled. "Me too."

He stilled.

She was still nodding when she heard what he'd heard. "I mean," she said froggily, through a throat tightened with tears, "you told _me_, and I never got to tell _you_, and I was thinking it and thinking it all these weeks and _I couldn't tell you_."

She sniffled an enormous sniff. "I didn't think I'd be crying and dirty when I told you but you have to know, _please tell me you knew when you left_ – I love _you. _I have for...well, allthetime._"_

Oliver was grinning now wide enough for teeth. So that it was almost impossible to kiss her properly, but he managed, still holding her face. He began to pull away to say something, but she'd begun to kiss him back, and caught his bottom lip in hers. He made a noise low in his throat and then his large hands moved and were everywhere across her back and the kiss was something else entirely.

9.

In the kitchen a machine beeped on followed by hissing dragon-noises of a coffeemaker. Oliver and Felicity, still kissing, paused and opened their eyes.

"Coffee." Felicity said, at the same time Oliver said, "Sun's up." Oliver smiled and kissed her again, and then just held her, her head buried in his shoulder, resisting what he felt might be a ridiculous urge to rock back and forth.

He looked around the bedroom. The sun was pouring in the room at the edges of her curtains in earnest now, and she heard as much as felt a chuckle rumble from somewhere deep inside him.

She wondered what could be so funny and turned in his arms to see what he was seeing. Then – "Oh god."

She hadn't realized the extent until she saw it now –some version of her Ms. Havisham vision of weeks ago come true- there were Vernlets growing everywhere, preening green from tiny pots all along the shelf above her bed, a quite big one hanging in the window, a row of unfurling little fiddleheads on top of the dresser by the door.

It would be worse down the hall, she thought, and in the bathroom. There was no escaping the reveal, unless she tied him up in here, and while that thought was vaguely appealing, it was also not the time. Besides, there wasn't anything to reveal anyway, outside of a survival mechanism. He knew how she felt – felt now and must have felt then.

"I, er, planted some cuttings. You know, like you showed us."

"Ah" Again the smile. This time with dimples.

"I swear to god, Oliver, if you tease me about this…"

"What?" he said, eyes mirthful. "I said nothing. I said _Ah_. As in, _I see_. As in," he said, kissing her very sweetly again, "_I understand_."

She groaned and bonked her head on his chest. "Good." She felt his back for a few moments under her hands, and lost a long minute just sinking in the feeling of him, solid and warm in her arms. She felt his back expand and contract with a gigantic yawn.

"Oh God, Oliver, you've been traveling! You're exhausted!"

"I'm not, I'm fine."

A happy _ding_ sounded from the kitchen. "Coffee!" she said, in a tone he'd heard her use once to say the word "landmines". And then she was scrambling out of bed and he admired the _Thursday_ as it clung to the ass he'd allowed himself to imagine (it was better) and made its way out of the bedroom. He adjusted himself as best he could and laid back on her bed, hearing the wonderful, comfortable sound of opening and shutting of cabinet doors and the clonk of the coffeepot…and then Felicity's whispered, "_shit_".

He was curious enough to investigate. He followed the sounds of her bumping and quiet cursing to a small kitchen, dotted with even more fern cuttings. Felicity was at the sink, pouring water straight from the faucet onto something. He came closer and, yes, there was Verne, sitting askew in a mixing bowl, getting a shower while Felicity removed muddy- was that _lemons?_ from the roots and plonked them in the sink.

She glanced back at him and saw his cocked head. "I had a little…rage…to get out. Pot's broken. Merlyn told us you were…"

He took a long step and put his hand her shoulder. "Hey. I'm not. I'm here." He kissed the top of her head, and said, "I'm glad you saved it."

She turned around quickly and held him tightly.

"How'd you do it?"

"Bo staff. You should see what John did to the arrow case."

The thought of her wielding a staff on a fern made him giddy, for some reason, so happy he felt he might effervesce. She made a weird little snort noise and it made him want to kiss her, so he did, and then he moved his kiss to behind her ear, and then to her neck.  
>"You smell...good." he murmured. "Like green. And dirt." She yelped.<p>

"Hey!" She squinted up at him to see if he was teasing her. What she saw made her say, "Oh! That's a…good thing?"

He nodded, distracted by her bottom lip and the heat that he was having trouble now controlling.

"Like…_landmines_ kind of good?" she asked.

He nodded again, and said, in a very low voice indeed, "Desert island guy." He took a steadying breath though his nose, and then, seeing her smile widely as she made the connection, gave up and attacked that bottom lip, deepening his kiss at the noise she made and finally he thought it best to just pick her up again. "Coffee?" she squeaked, through a kiss, and he smiled into her mouth and then just kissed her again.

"Later."

"Shower?" He raised his eyebrow at her. "I mean, I'm pretty dirty. I mean…with actual _soil_…"

"Later."

"Ok then." Felicity said, and kissed him. He carried her out of the kitchen. Together, they passed the living room, where a small forest of ferns bowed their green heads at them, and the bathroom, where a lively cluster of humidity-loving ferns reached their fronds up to the sun in celebration. She muttered, "on the right", into his mouth when he paused for direction, and by the time they got to the bedroom, a tangle of undone belt buckles and buttons and bra straps, the Thursday underpants were on their way to the floor. If the ferns in her room were surprised and delighted, they were discreet enough to not show it. The two people on the bed were clearly surprised and delighted enough.


End file.
